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Bolts are a type of ammunition used by crossbows. They can be made from either wood, bone, or weapons-grade metals. As with all non-siege ammo, hunting and military dwarves must be equipped with quivers to be able to carry bolts around for shooting.

When fired, bolts have a chance of shattering on impact or bouncing off onto the ground as free-laying items. However, they are immediately forbidden after being fired (to prevent suicidal hauling dwarves from running into active battlefields), and have to be reclaimed by the player, either directly or from the stocks screen.

Given that bolts are a projectile weapon, their weight influences their effectiveness (higher weight means higher inertia, making them harder to deflect). Tests show that where even masterwork wooden bolts bounce harmlessly off copper armor, iron bolts pierce without any issue. Bone bolts are significantly better than wood, but metal bolts are still recommended for military use [1]. Adamantine bolts are effective despite their low density - it is offset by their superior sharpness/hardness (see weapon materials), which allows adamantine bolts to tear through all metal armors, with the notable exception of adamantine armor itself. When pitted against itself, the low-density adamantine bolts deflect 99.99% of the time. As comparison, bolts made out of non-adamantine metals fired at armor of equal or superior hardness do not deflect and simply deal converted blunt damage instead of edge damage.

As with other items, high-skill dwarves can make masterwork-quality bolts. While they don't care if the bolts are fired and shatter on impact, they do get upset if a bolt gets carried off the map - say, by a retreating enemy with the bolt stuck in them.

The simplest remedy for this is to simply make more bolts - a dwarf who has produced hundreds of masterwork bolts will be more annoyed by flies than the loss of a masterwork. This is because the stress penalty for the loss of a masterwork is divided by the number of remaining masterwork items made by that dwarf (see thoughts for more information).

Sometimes dwarves refuse to pick up stockpiled ammo, especially if you have been hauling used ammo back to your bins. Try disabling your current ammo stockpile and making a new one temporarily. Failing that: craft new bolts.[1] One workaround is to dedicate less ammo for each dwarf to increase the chances that there will be enough for everyone (m,f, use - to decrease dedicated ammo for each squad - 50 is more than enough). Disabling bins in ammo stockpiles may avoid this problem.Bug:2706

Masterwork bolts cause unhappy thoughts when they get carried off the map or melted downBug:3169. The solution to this is to make more bolts, since the unhappy thought caused by "art defacement" becomes less significant the more masterpieces a dwarf has produced.